1898
Spanish-American War
Congress declared war on Spain in the name of Cuba Libre. Within four months, the United States had taken Manila, sunk the Spanish fleet at Santiago, and occupied Puerto Rico. Spain ceded Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines; the United States paid twenty million dollars. An empire had just changed hands, and America had acquired one by mistake.
Curies Discover Radium
Pierre and Marie Curie, working in a leaking shed in Paris, announced the isolation of a new element two million times more radioactive than uranium. They named it radium. Marie would refine it, grain by grain, from tons of Bohemian pitchblende. Two Nobel Prizes and a fatal dose of exposure lay ahead.
Battle of Omdurman
Kitchener's Anglo-Egyptian army met the last Mahdist army outside Khartoum and shot it to pieces with Maxim guns - eleven thousand dervishes killed, fewer than fifty British. A young cavalry lieutenant named Winston Churchill rode in one of the last proper cavalry charges in British history. Gordon had been avenged; the Sudan was reconquered.
Hundred Days Reform Fails
After a hundred days of frantic modernizing edicts by the young Guangxu Emperor - on railways, schools, exams, everything - the Dowager Empress Cixi emerged from retirement, placed the emperor under house arrest in a Forbidden City pavilion, and executed his reformers. China's chance at Meiji-style top-down change had, for this generation, just died.
Hawaii Annexed
Congress passed a joint resolution annexing the Hawaiian Islands. Queen Liliuokalani, the deposed monarch, protested in a dignified letter to Washington that was ignored. The strategic value of Pearl Harbor - soon an American naval base - had trumped the scruples of five years earlier. The United States was now a Pacific power.
J'accuse
Emile Zola published an open letter to the President of France on the front page of L'Aurore, accusing the army of framing Dreyfus and covering it up. Zola was tried for libel and fled to England. The letter turned a military scandal into a national convulsion about justice, the army, and the place of Jews in the republic.
USS Maine Explodes
Just after nine in the evening, the American battleship USS Maine blew up at anchor in Havana harbor, killing 266 sailors. The cause was probably a coal-bunker fire reaching the magazine. The yellow press blamed Spanish sabotage. "Remember the Maine!" became the rallying cry for a war the United States had already half-decided to fight.